NORTH CAROLINA
Associated Press
BY MITCH WEISS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SPINDALE, N.C. (AP) — She looks like a successful businesswoman, with her neatly coifed blonde hair, St. John business suit, flashy diamond rings and jewelry dangling from her wrist. And she has devoted followers – an entourage – that hang on her every word and carry out her orders without question.
But Jane Whaley isn’t the chief executive officer of a large corporation. Instead, she’s the 77-year-old leader of a 750-member evangelical church called Word of Faith Fellowship – one that dozens of former members say encourages congregants to violently attack family and friends to beat out imaginary devils they believe are destroying their lives.
So who is Jane Whaley?
Her father owned a plumbing repair company, and her mother was a homemaker. She had two brothers and grew up in a rural North Carolina community in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains during the heart of the Jim Crow era.
After graduating from college, she taught math at a high school and met a deeply religious man from Florence, South Carolina, who would become her husband: Sam Whaley. They had one child and, in the mid-1970s, moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, so her husband could attend a Bible school. They also traveled the world, preaching the “word of God,” friends said.
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